University of Ottawa yoga class suspended for “cultural appropriation”

This could have come from The Onion, but these days it’s hard to tell the difference with articles like this one from the Ottawa Sun. The Student Federation at the University of Ottawa, apparently infected with the same brain virus that’s sweeping through British student unions and U.S. colleges like Dartmouth, has suspended a yoga class because it’s a form of “cultural appropriation”. This may have been prompted by a complaint from the Centre for Students with Disabilities:

Staff at the Centre for Students with Disabilities believe that “while yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students … there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice,” according to an email from the centre.

The centre is operated by the university’s Student Federation, which first approached Scharf seven years ago about offering yoga instruction to students both with and without disabilities.

The centre goes on to say, “Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced,” and which cultures those practices “are being taken from.”

The centre official argues since many of those cultures “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy … we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.”

Well, all I know of yoga classes is that the ones my friends take are given as a form of exercise and stretching that originated in Asia. I have never heard of any class even remotely resembling “cultural appropriation.” If it is, then going out for an Indian meal, something I love to do, is also “cultural appropriation.” (In fact it is seen by some people as that—an issue I’ll discuss tomorrow.) At any rate, it is not “cultural appropriation” to adopt some practices or eating habits that you admire from other cultures; and those who promote diversity don’t realize that by doing stuff like banning yoga classes, or criticizing our penchant for ethnic food (see tomorrow’s post!), they’re actually suppressing diversity.

It gets even worse: they tried to fix the issue by renaming “yoga”!:

Ahimakin said the student federation put the yoga session on hiatus while they consult with students “to make it better, more accessible and more inclusive to certain groups of people that feel left out in yoga-like spaces. … We are trying to have those sessions done in a way in which students are aware of where the spiritual and cultural aspects come from, so that these sessions are done in a respectful manner.”

Scharf [the yoga instructor] offered a compromise, suggesting she change the name from yoga to “mindful stretching,” since that would reflect the content of the program and would “literally change nothing about the course.”

“I’m not pretending to be some enlightened yogi master, and the point (of the program) isn’t to educate people on the finer points of the ancient yogi scripture,” she told the Sun.

“The point is to get people to have higher physical awareness for their own physical health and enjoyment.”

According to email correspondence between Scharf and the centre, student leaders debated rebranding the program, but stumbled over how the French translation for “mindful stretching” would appear on a promotional poster, and eventually decided to suspend the program.

This is absolutely insane. Apparently the “no offense” virus has spread quickly and widely, and is now in Canada.

I’ll just echo those who espouse the offense culture: “I can’t even. . . ”

Jennifer Scharf, beleaguered yoga mindful stretching instructor